Conclusion
It’s still early days for consumer VR technology, but if you’re looking for a PC to buy right now that is designed to work well with the current headsets, here are six viable options that you can be sure will work.
If you want to keep costs low, then either the Zoostorm Stormforce Hurricane at £799 or the Kinetic VR Gaming PC from Overclockers at £739 would fit the bill. The slightly more expensive Zoostorm offers greater flexibility and upgradability, thanks to its full-sized mid tower case, and comes with a slightly more powerful CPU to boot. The Overclockers system, on the other hand, is compact and would be a great choice if you plan to move your VR setup around.
However, both of these systems will feel a little sluggish when put to general purpose use as they have slower processors that run without overclocking, and the GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards will hold them back from the competition in general gaming.
If your pockets are rather deeper than that, a PC such as the Wired2Fire Diablo Predator VR will fit the bill admirably. This system combines a high end nVidia GTX 980 Ti graphics card with a sensibly overclocked CPU and doesn’t skimp on any of the supporting components, resulting in a great all-round VR-ready PC for just under £1,200
Between these two extremes there’s still plenty of choice, but it will involve some degree of compromise: if you want the best gaming performance but don’t want to shell out over £1,000, then you could go for Yoyotech’s Warbird RS14. This PC performs really well, but does spend most of the budget on the graphics card, so if you use your PC for other things, you will find it considerably slower than an model with an overclocked processor and more RAM.
The best all-round PC is, for us, the Chillblast Fusion Catapult, which comes with a full 16GB of RAM, an overclocked CPU and a reasonably-sized high-performance SSD. Its AMD Radeon R9 390X graphics card delivers good, although not class-leading gaming performance that is more than adequate for VR and a decent step up from the budget systems.
Palicomp, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach, with the performance weighted heavily towards the highly overclocked CPU. The i5 Matrix also comes with a great gaming motherboard, 16GB of RAM and premium components, but the GeForce GTX 980 graphics card doesn’t match the performance of the rest of the system, leaving it beaten in gaming tests by some PCs which cost less overall.
To further complicate matters, you need to be aware that we are still at the beginning of the journey into widespread consumer VR and the goalposts are likely to keep moving. While the recommended specs for the current VR headsets is designed to remain constant for the foreseeable future, PC hardware will continue to evolve. NVidia’s latest GTX 1070 and GTX 1008 graphics cards look set to deliver far better performance than the current generation and at a lower price, so by the time you read this you may be able to buy these same PCs with vastly improved graphics or reduced prices. All we can say is, watch this space.